I want to tell you my favorite story about kente, though it will
require something of a confession. The confession is simply this: I am
convinced that it is kente -- in its extraordinary diversity, in the
richness of what it says -- that really is the secret to having raised
all that money at Spelman College. Let me tell you the story:

Strips of kente are very, very popular now among graduating classes. I
have one that says "Spelman College" and one that says "Class of '91."
Well during those ten years at Spelman, there was a lot of kente
floating around. And so students began to wear the strips at their
graduations and I would often wear kente because it felt good to put on
a piece of kente -- in part out of my own very, very deep feelings of
attachment to the west coast of Africa but certainly also through an
attachment to all that kente says and tickles our hearts to feel.

On one particular occasion when we were working very, very hard indeed
to solicit some major money -- a million dollars -- from a particular
American corporation, we had an idea. The idea was very simply to
acknowledge the way in which kente is so entangled in the history of a
part of the world now called Ghana. But we realized that one will never
understand kente if it is viewed in exclusive ways, as if it can only
belong to the Asante people, or to the people of Ghana, as if it can
only be worn by folk of African decent. And so our idea was to indeed
present the program we thought would present Spelman in its most
glorious way and then, at the end of the program, I would take strips of
kente and I would place them on the shoulders of these very, very
distinguished white men of corporate America.

We did it. Not only did we get the million dollars, I want you to know
that it became a tradition. Whenever a gift was presented to Spelman,
this became our way of saying "Thank You. Ashe." Presenting kente
became our way of expressing community, our way of acknowledging the
extraordinary power of kente to wrap people not only in pride but in a
relationship.